‘I have a funny relationship with that book,” says author Yann Martel about The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios and Other Stories, an early short fiction collection from 1993 that he has remained surprisingly close to over the years, even after the success of his Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi. It was Helsinki, and not Self, his first novel, that he chose to reissue after the success of Pi; Helsinki’s titular story has also seen a screen and numerous stage adaptations, the latest of which, directed by Bruce Smith, comes to Factory Theatre this Wednesday as part of their Performance Spring program.

“The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios,” like several other stories in the collection, is autobiographical — a transposition of Martel’s experiences in university. The story, set in 1986, tells of a narrator’s relationship with his friend Paul, who is dying of AIDS, contracted from a blood transfusion. Overwhelmed in the face of such mortality, and insistent on the powers of optimism and art, the narrator concocts a game: the two will tell the tale of the fictional, Italian-­­
Finnish Roccamatio family in 100 chapters, each of which uses, in strict chronology, an event during a year in the 20th century as its allegorical basis.

“I like the idea of comparing ontology and philology, the individual and history,” says Martel. “How can a life be individual in some ways and also echo the life of a time, of a century? I still like that device [in “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios”] very much. It’s unwieldy and cumbersome, but there’s something there.”

This is substantiated in the very few differences between the story’s prose and theatrical incarnations. Martel’s narrator becomes, in this current staging, actor Eric Goulem, whose sustained monologue is often taken verbatim from the story, and is augmented with a bit of multimedia. “Some may find it a bit dated in the sense that AIDS feels so ’80s, which is nonsense,” says Martel.

“Though, every generation in history seems to have its signature disease. The positive of [AIDS being associated with a particular decade] is in a way it gives a certain sense of history to the play.”
We discuss illness as metaphor, then, and Martel, pace Sontag, feels that it may actually be of some use. “This is something I’m thinking about for my new book, which is about the Holocaust,” he says. “I agree that illness and tragedy, if you’re undergoing them, do not need metaphor. You’re facing them, and they’re an integral part of life, so there’s no point in transforming them into something else.

“If you’re a spectator, however, whether of someone now or in the past, or even of a friend of a friend who is ill, then metaphor is useful. You can’t feel someone else’s pain; it has to be spoken of in metaphor. Even direct, medical terms like ‘seizure’ or ‘cramp’ are metaphors.”

The notion is clearly integral to “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios,” and also to Martel’s pet project, What Is Stephen Harper Reading?, a website tracking his thus-far-unsuccessful attempt to start a cultural dialogue with the PM by sending him, every two weeks, classics by the likes of Tolstoy and Woolf (see www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca).

“It’s in many ways presumptuous; I have no idea what the man reads; I presume he doesn’t read; he certainly hasn’t said anything to the contrary,” says Martel. “I figure if his finances are accountable to us, why not his imagination? I’m allowed to ask what he thinks about us, life, mortality, beauty. If he never reads a book, never sees a play, never even watches a TV program, what kind of human being is he?”